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This issue marks the second in our special series commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education (APJTE). As expressed in our first issue, a number of initiatives are underway to harness the history of the journal – its editors, leading articles that were deemed to make a difference in the field as well as the topics and debates that have headlined different periods in the journal. APJTE is the journal of the Australian Teacher Education Association (ATEA) and as noted in our previous editorial (Takayama, Kettle, Heimans & Biesta, 2022), the association and APJTE have always been internationalist in their orientation; indeed, the association was originally titled the South Pacific Association of Teacher Education before changing to ATEA in 1988.
In this issue, our focus turns to calls for action in teacher education research and practice from scholars who represent the diversity of voices characterising the field. The scholars initially presented their ideas at the 2021 ATEA conference and were subsequently invited to expand on them in this celebratory anniversary issue. We have invoked the metaphor of calls and voices to foreground the meaning and urgency of the arguments in the papers. In everyday life, we are familiar with the concept of calls – the call to prayer, bird calls, a clarion call – where the function is to communicate important meaning appropriately and in context. For example, we might understand the respective calls listed above as follows: a gracious invocation to pause and listen, the delineation of territory and the drive for survival and sustainability, and an emphatic request for something to happen. In all three instances, the people and birds issuing the calls are imbued with the authority and capabilities to make their messages meaningful and relevant.
In the same way, we argue that the people issuing calls for action in teacher education research and practice in this APJTE publication have the authority and expertise afforded by experience, roles, insights, and longevity of engagement in the field. They offer meaningful and important conceptualisations of teaching, teachers, and teacher education. As such, they delineate the field as it currently stands and foreground the areas that need urgently redressing to ensure our ongoing legitimacy and relevance. In addition, they offer possibilities and strategies for new directions in teacher education, ones that entail change and a level of adaptation to the prevailing conditions, particularly economic and political agendas, and articulate new forms of engagement with communities, students, families, and practitioners. Like all calls to action and the ensuing politics and power relations, our authors remind us that these possibilities open up new conceptual, political, and relational territory but are best ventured into together – as a field, guided by an association such as ATEA. We therefore consider the papers presented in this issue to be compulsory reading for anyone interested in teacher education and invite you to pause and listen to the scholarly voices of the authors.
The first invited paper is by the President of ATEA Associate Professor Deborah Heck and is titled Teacher educators as public intellectuals: Exploring possibilities. The paper engages with the contemporary economic and political landscape of positioning teaching and teacher education as problematic, exemplified in the downsizing of teacher education faculties and in some cases, their submergence and loss of specialisation – and delineation as a field – into generalist, composite departments. She invokes the role of the public intellectual as a possibility for teacher educators to “break the normal” and embark on deliberative dialogues of hope and indeed, exhilaration, through activism in the field.
The second invited paper is by University of Washington Emeritus Professor of Teacher Education Ken Zeichner who was a keynote speaker at the 2021 ATEA conference and outlines his arguments on the current challenges and possibilities for teacher education, especially in the United States. Resonating with the previous paper, he notes funding constraints and structural reconfigurations in teacher education courses and schooling, and the implications for students from non-dominant communities who comprise significant cohorts in American schools. To address the inequities and assert the “rightful presence” of communities in the education of their children, he calls for a democratising of education and provides persuasive examples of how this approach has been actioned.
Aspects of diversity and inclusion in teacher education research and practice have been foregrounded in APJTE, for example, in special issues such as Systematic Reviews in Indigenous education research (Issue 1, Volume 49) and Schooling and poverty: Re-thinking Impact, Research and Social Justice (Issue 1, Volume 48). Continuing this focus, the following four authors were invited to present their responses to our eight challenges (Biesta, Takayama, Kettle & Heimans, 2020) in a symposium at the 2021 ATEA conference and in a more expanded form for this issue. University of Queensland Senior Lecturer Dr Marnee Shay is an Aboriginal educator and researcher whose paper titled The Ripple Effect: Epistemic and professional justice in Indigenous education argues that the future of Indigenous education requires Indigenous people: Indigenous “intellectualism, knowledge, culture, solutions and imaginations.” While responding to our challenges, she also challenges APJTE and teacher education research more broadly to recognise the discourses of science that continue to undermine “Indigenous people’s knowledges, ontologies and sovereignty.”
The call for editors to consider the politics of publication is echoed in the invited paper of Monash University Lecturer Dr Eisuke Saito titled Voices from the developing nations of Asia and the Pacific: Deliberations on the problematisations by the editors about the Global South. In this paper, he draws attention to the challenges for teacher educators in the Global South including ethical dilemmas and quandaries about actions to take in the face of political turmoil, for example, in countries such as Burma/ Myanmar and Afghanistan. In addition, he discusses the “policy borrowing and lending” imposed by transnational organisations and calls for editors to recognise the struggles of Global South teacher education researchers who seek to contribute knowledge to international journals but are thwarted by highly exclusionary rejection practices around standard English and text structure.
Within the same ethos of responding to our editors’ challenges, University of Queensland Mathematics Lecturer Dr Jana Visnovska and Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, México, Professor José Luis Cortina present a paper titled Teaching, teachers, and teaching resources in mathematics education research. Their stated aim is to reclaim meaningful, rigorous, and politically astute conceptions of theory and teaching in mathematics education research. The authors describe practices and resource designs that support students to recognise themselves as “legitimate doers of mathematics’ and conceptualise mathematics as “cultural practice” that is valuable beyond the classroom.
The final invited paper is by Australian teacher education foundation scholar Charles Sturt University Emeritus Professor Jo-Anne Reid who is a previous co-editor of APJTE and former President of ATEA. The paper is titled Challenges to the field of teacher education research and is the platform for a provocation to the field, namely “What is education for?” She argues that education is almost by definition about change and calls for teacher education practice and research to educate future schoolteachers about education, in the interests of “preparing a citizenry that can make the best decisions for itself going forward.” Her argument is that without this knowledge, teachers in countries with colonial histories such as Australia will “remain subject to the narrow, doctrinal interests of the traditional social structures that scaffolded the nation.”
In this issue, we also have our regular collection of articles that resonate with the topics and arguments presented in the invited pieces. The articles cover topics of teacher identity and the embedding of numeracy across the curriculum (Anne Bennison), professional learning, teacher education and cyberbullying (Roberta Thompson), professional inquiry and meaningful teacher accountability (Joanna Lim, Leticia Fickel & Janinka Greenwood), and intercultural competence and international service-learning (Alison Wrench, Bec Neill & Alexandra Diamond).
As editors, we are honoured to have engaged with the teacher education researchers presented in this commemorative issue of APJTE. Their conceptualisations of challenges and calls for action provide clear possibilities and directions as we move forward into the future of APJTE and the field of teacher education research and practice.